


now the day bleeds

by Mellaithwen



Category: Captain America (Movies), Captain America - All Media Types, Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Angst, Avengers: Endgame (Movie), Avengers: Endgame (Movie) Trailer, Depression, Grief/Mourning, M/M, Missing Scene, Post-Avengers: Infinity War Part 1 (Movie), Steve Rogers is depressed, Survivor Guilt, Therapy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-10
Updated: 2019-02-10
Packaged: 2019-10-25 22:50:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,605
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17734148
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Mellaithwen/pseuds/Mellaithwen
Summary: Spoilers for the Avengers: Endgame Superbowl teaserSteve attends group therapy (and all the things he doesn't say out loud)Where do we go now that they’re gone? Good fucking question, he thinks darkly, good fucking question.





	now the day bleeds

**Author's Note:**

> The "character death" warning seems a little redundant for anything set post-infinity war, but just in cases I've tagged it. This is obviously being written before Endgame comes out, so it's speculation based on the trailer.
> 
> For the whole length of writing this had a Springsteen working title (points to anyone who can guess which one) but then Lewis Capaldi ruined me so here we are.
> 
>  _Now the day bleeds into nightfall_  
>  And you're not here to get me through it all  
> I let my guard down, and then you pulled the rug  
> I was getting kinda used to being someone you loved

 

 

 

“.....and then she was gone.”

 

The middle aged man sitting opposite Steve in the semi-circle of their group therapy session is wringing his hands in his lap as he shares his loss. There are twelve chairs set out in the back-room of the VA Centre on Chapel Street, but only five of them are occupied. The man, who had introduced himself as Joe some ten minutes prior, has today shared his own experience with the group, staring at the ground as he echoes the same sentiments they all feel, and still struggle to comprehend.

 

Steve knows it’s supposed to help. The sharing, that is. He knows that hearing these strangers talk about their own trauma is supposed to make his own pain more bearable. But he can’t focus. Instead, it’s as if he’s only hearing every other word. His mind can’t help but wander, as he stews in silence, steeped in his own survivor’s guilt, with his arms crossed over his chest, and his jaw clenched tight. At least he made it out of the doorway this time—that’s closer than he ever managed in Sam’s meetings in D.C.

 

 _“You won’t get anything out of it if you don’t try.”_ Steve can hear Sam’s voice say in the back of his head.

 

Except Sam isn’t even here so that can’t be right.

 

The last time Steve even saw him, they were both in the forest on the Wakandan border. _“Eyes up, stay sharp!”_ Steve had told his team-mates— _commanded his soldiers_ —before throwing himself into battle. Not that it mattered. He’d been flung around the woods like a rag-doll, and every hit, every punch, every kick hadn’t made a damn bit of difference in the end.

 

Everything changed all the same, until they were all surrounded by ash and dust and _—_

 

“—and then there was nothing, nothing at all that I could do. God, I’ve never felt so useless.” Joe says, and a few others murmur in agreement.

 

Steve had considered going to church first, but even standing on the steps of St Cecilia’s had felt like a lie. He hasn’t exactly been showing up for Sunday mass lately, and he sure as hell hasn’t been to confession. The last service he went to, he was half the size he is now, and he really only went to light a candle in his mother’s memory, and another for the safe return of….He sighs quietly, and shifts in his seat. Suffice to say, he doesn’t find comfort in the church anymore.

 

Bruce had been the one to suggest it. He’d found Steve after a week of no sleep—half delirious—trying to write a letter with the date on the header as 1945.

 

“I gotta be the one to tell his ma’, it should come from me,” he’d said brokenly, while Bruce had prised the pen out of his hands, and guided him toward the lamp-light to examine him properly—gently prodding at the deep bags under his eyes, so pronounced that they looked painful, like bruises, purple and aching.

 

He’d passed him the pamphlet with a small self-deprecating smile, and he’d begged Steve to try and get some rest.

 

 _Where do we go now that they’re gone?_ Good fucking question, Steve thinks darkly. Good fucking question.

 

Desi, a small plump woman with tightly curled dark hair, was a grief counsellor before...all of this, and she’d set up the group off of her own back. Steve doubts she ever expected Captain America to grace her with his presence, but then he’d spent too much time watching Sam’s sessions from the comfort of the corridor, so he figured it was about time that he ventured inside. If she’d expected him to bring an ounce of hope, or positivity in with him, then she’d been sorely mistaken.

 

 _“You don’t have to be their fucking mascot, Steve!”_ Bucky had yelled at him once, while they were hiding out inside of a bombed out grocers in France—part of an argument that had almost come to blows— _“I know you! I can see this is eating you up—fuck, you’re not even supposed to be here!”_

 

And then later still, with Gabe keeping watch, and Steve feigning sleep, Bucky had apologised to him in the dark. “I’d have come back.” He’d whispered, and Steve had never known if Bucky had wanted him to truly hear him or not. “If you’d have waited, I swear I’d have come back home to you.”

 

_Lies. Lies. Lies._

 

The problem is—Steve muses to himself, while another member of their circle speaks up—is that he realised very early on that he doesn’t want to move on. Not really.

 

He wants to drown. He wants the grief, and hopelessness, and pain to finally swallow him whole. Because he thinks it’s a hell of a lot better than accepting this new awful reality for what it is.

 

He feels like he’s just going through the motions, day by day. He spars with Nat, he trains with Thor, he tries meditating with Bruce, and when that doesn’t work, he takes a book to sit with him instead, but the words blur together, and he only turns the page for the sake of it. He plays chess with Rhodey until the pieces go flying, and Steve can’t remember which one of them swiped them onto the floor in frustration, but neither one of them had looked surprised when they did. Scattered pawns at their feet...

 

He does all of this, and then on a Thursday evening, he goes to group. He gets there early, every week, but he always hovers across the street until at least two other people have arrived. He keeps his shoulders tense, and he rallies against years of his mother’s insistence that he be a kind face to strangers— _like a port in a storm_ , Peggy said once. But not anymore. Now he’s little more than a shadow in the corner. A shadow that keeps going back week, after week, after—

 

“—if I could just get a second with him, that’s all I’d need, and I could show him why my brother was worthy—why he didn’t deserve to die.”

 

Steve blinks, and frowns as the words sink in. He wants to explain to Jess—who’s currently talking—that it wouldn’t have made a lick of difference. He wants to tell them about how Thanos would go from planet to planet, attacking and destroying everything in his path, his only goal to divide the population, and to cut them down by the thousands, with swords, and guns, and alien tech. The only difference is now he can do it faster. The horror of genocide whittled down to something as careless, and insignificant as the click of his fingers.

 

Steve wants to blurt out that Thanos would kill the most important person in the universe just to serve his own screwed up sense of purpose, and damn anyone who tried to get in his way.

 

But that would mean talking, and that’s not even remotely something he wants to do right now.

 

He must have failed to school his features in time though because now Desi’s looking right at him, and the room’s quiet, like everyone’s holding their breath. He wants to laugh. He has an eidetic memory, but he’s 100% sure these civilians don’t want that kind of play-by-play. They don’t want him to talk about Rhodey calling out for Sam, or Okoye driving her spear into the ground with a shriek. They don’t want to know what it looks like when Captain America’s knees buckle out from under him, and he whispers; _“oh god,”_ to the warm dusty soil beneath his fingertips. They don’t want to know how Steve had heard every word Vision had whispered to Wanda in the distance, as he encouraged her to kill him. _It shouldn’t be you, but it is_ — _people are gonna die Buck, I can’t let that happen_ —

 

_“We are out of time,” Vision had said while Steve and the rest of his team had stumbled to their feet to race towards their enemy for the second time._

 

_He remembers trying to swipe at Thanos, and landing an uppercut to his chin. He remembers jabbing at his chest, and throwing all of the might of his super-serumed-strength behind his closed fist, and that asshole hadn’t even flinched. He remembers hearing the rat-at-at-tat of Bucky’s machine gun behind him, and feeling cold when the sound suddenly stopped.  He remembers trying to prise the fingers of the gauntlet apart as it beared down on him._

 

_He remembers screaming._

 

 _And he remembers being pummelled to the ground; his ears ringing, his brain rattling around inside of his skull. He remembers trying to blink away the blurred vision, while the colours of the Wakandan forest all meshed together, while he spat out bile and tried to stumble back to his feet. Back to the fight_ — _I could do this all day_ — _sometimes I think you like getting punched—_

 

 _He remembers putting a hand to his ribs_ and _feeling them creak as he’d stood; how his fingers had come away bloody._

 

_He remembers Thor arriving in a cloud of blinding light, like a guardian angel come to save them._

 

_And then he remembers the sound of that awful click._

 

_And then a voice calling out his name._

 

_“Steve?”_

 

The coppery taste in his mouth makes him want to gag, and when he blinks, he realises he must have bitten through his tongue.

 

Again.

 

“Steve?” Desi calls again, and he feels a little sick because in his mind’s eye he can still see Bucky calling out as he vanishes into thin air. “Steve, would you like to share today?”

 

Sharing doesn’t have to mean talking about that day. Desi makes that perfectly clear at the start of every meeting. _It can be whatever you want. Whatever you’re comfortable with._

 

Mark told them he felt like he was being left behind. But then he only came to three meetings, and he hasn’t been to the last two.  Last week Anita shared her wife’s shortbread recipe. She talked about the ingredients as though they were the single most important thing in the world to her. Plain flour, unsalted butter, sugar, and vanilla, and it was...nice. It was normal. As though they weren’t all sat in a circle trying to work through their grief. As though they were just huddled together at a bus stop, or waiting for the next train car. Neighbours being neighbourly, sharing recipes on the stoop.

 

Steve doesn’t doesn’t know where to start. He doesn’t know how to explain it all. He’s been in love with his best friend since he was fourteen, and every single time he finds him again, he loses him just the same, and it’s getting old.

 

 _He_ ’s getting old.

 

 _“You don’t look a day over ninety-five,”_ Bucky had whispered in the dark of their tiny cottage on the edge of the farmlands. But that was before. Before everything went to shit.

 

Back in the day, Falsworth would have called it a _“colossal fuckup of the nth degree.”_ It was the kind of thing he used to say whenever the high-ups promised new weapons to use against the Nazi’s, or aerial cover for one of their raids that everyone knew they’d never provide. _“Hear, hear, Monty!_ ” Dugan would cheer, raising his flask to the sky whilst Bucky and Steve got their heads down to plan a new route that didn’t involve stumbling into enemy territory and getting their heads blown off.

 

Steve’s pretty sure his group doesn’t want to hear his old War stories either. So what does that leave? He doesn’t have any recipes to share, except maybe a handful handed down from his mother, but then they’re all in a notebook on display in the Smithsonian. _Your mom’s name was Sarah_ , _you used to wear_ —no, stop it.

 

Stop it.

 

The truth is, all Steve wants to do is stay in that quiet place; when he's still asleep, but his body's starting to wake up, and he's adamant that he can really _feel_ that hand held in his, when it feels so so real....before the nightmare of waking takes hold.

 

He wants to lie back and pretend that he’s in Wakanda again; that he’s lying on the grass, with Bucky’s body curled up against him, and his head cradled on Steve’s chest. The sky above them is starting to fill with stars, and Bucky’s humming happily while Steve’s fingers idly card through his hair.

 

 _“Mmm, that’s nice, don’t stop,”_ Bucky mumbles in a low-sleepy sort of way that sends all of the blood in Steve’s body to his crotch. This is the moment he wants to live in. The sun hasn’t long set, and there’s enough twilight for them to see each other in the near darkness. They don’t need to talk about how long they have together before Steve has to leave again, because they have all the time they need. He doesn’t need to say that every time he visits Wakanda it gets harder and harder to leave again, because this is their life now, together, and happy, and whole; their bodies pressed in close and their eyes shut to the world.

 

 _“You’d suck at goat herding._ ” Bucky would say, just as he had back then, because the laughter that followed was chased by a deep kiss that betrayed more longing than a thousand conversations ever could.

 

But as much as Steve clings to that memory, it always shifts, it always changes, and sometimes it’s even crueller than reality—sometimes beneath the starlight, Bucky’s form starts to crumble into ash—weeks too soon. And in the dream Steve starts to cry out but when he wakes, his screams always seem to die in his throat, and he bolts upright with nothing more than a choked sob instead.

 

He’s so tired.

 

He lost his friends, he lost his partner, his family.

 

The other half of his _soul_.

 

He runs his tongue over his teeth, gnaws at his bottom lip to relish the sting, because he’ll do anything to feel _something_ other than permanently numb. He’s so fucking _tired_.

 

_“Some stuff you leave there, other stuff you bring back. It’s our job to figure out how to carry it. Is it gonna be a big suitcase, or in a little man-purse? It’s up to you.”_

 

Steve shivers a little at the memory. He has a rucksack full of baggage trailing behind him. His shoulders are hunched from the weight of it, and that’s why he’s here now, in this dimly lit backroom.

 

He needs to lighten the load, but a part of him, a huge part of him, feels like he deserves it. He wears his loss like a huge albatross around his neck. This is his punishment. He should have done more. He should have tried harder, and he has to fix it, he has to, but he doesn’t know how. What had Peggy said in the hospital? _The world has changed, and none of us can go back._

 

_Well fuck that._

 

He’s gonna fix this. There has to be a way. There has to be.

 

“Steve, would you like to share today?”

 

He shakes his head. “No,” he says, unfailingly polite, because old habits die hard, “no thank you,” he repeats, before excusing himself and getting to his feet. He can feel his cell-phone buzzing away in his pocket, and he knows he has work to do.

 

He’s going to fix this.

 

No matter what.

  
  


**_-Fin._ **

**Author's Note:**

> Dear Steve-in-Endgame,  
> Please don't die.  
> Signed, me, who cannot handle that possibility....


End file.
